This man is searching for life. Materially he doesn't lack for anything but for some reason he doesn't feel very much alive. Materially, Jesus has nothing yet seems to be fully alive. So whatever Jesus has the man wants. The only snag is that if he is to have this life which is in Jesus then he needs to let go of these other things that he falsely associates with life.

Yesterday we were posed the question by Fr Columkille, "Who is this me whom God calls?" It's a very important question. Certainly the aliveness of Jesus seems to stem from that awareness of who he is. He is so fully immersed in his identity as beloved son, that even when it comes to dying there is nothing that he wants to keep, nothing that he needs to hold on to, not even life itself Jesus is totally free to die. And I think that unless we have some understanding of what it's like to discover ourselves and to discover life to the extent that we are free to die, then it's hard to know why we would celebrate the life of someone who died at the age of 23 before he'd ever had the chance to attain the things which he had dreamed about.

At a certain moment Francis Possenti arrived at the same point as the man in the gospel. He had arrived at it on the one hand through pain, the early separation from his mother and her subsequent death before he was 4 years old; the deaths of three of his sisters and two of his brothers, one of them committing suicide; and a near death experience of his own. On the other hand he had arrived at this point through pleasure; mostly orchestrated by his father who, so horrified at the thought that his son might become a religious, plunges him into a hedonistic world that is as different from Passionist life as you could get. And then one day the moment of choice comes back to him in that experience before the icon of Mary. Where is life to be found? Where is his own true self to be found? And unlike the man in the gospel he says yes to following Jesus, and he becomes a Passionists.

Six years later he's dead, before he ever became the priest, the preacher, or the missioner that he wanted to be. But by then he seems to have found his identity so clearly in the Crucified Christ, and to have found life so fully, that when the TB struck there was nothing that he wanted to keep, nothing that he needed to hold on to, not even life itself. He was free to dies. I don't think I've reached that point yet. I still struggle a bit with just deciding, in relation to things, and sometimes to people, well what's enough, and what's not enough, and what's too much; and with acknowledging that if I have too much of anything then that contributes to someone, somewhere, not having enough. On this feast of Gabriel I pray for all of us that we will find both our true selves, and the fullness of life, in Christ, because I think that's what this thing we call religious life is meant to be about, I think that's what makes it worth having given up everything else.